The Speakers

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Keynote Speaker: Elisabeth Camp

Stories and Selves

I argue that stories are “equipment for living” in two senses: retrospectively, they provide synoptic “configurational comprehension” of a temporal sequence of events; and prospectively, they offer principles for guiding action. Narrative conceptions of selfhood appear poised to explain these functional roles in terms of who an agent is. However, the “retrospective necessity” of narrative structure entails that the narrative conception holds selves hostage, epistemically, normatively and practically, to the ends of their lives. I offer some alternative species of frames that also provide configurational comprehension 

 

 Graduate Speakers

 

Better Than the Best? Supererogation in Deontic Modality / Anni Sun

A supererogatory action is morally good but not morally required. It is something that is better than those merely fulfilling the moral obligation. The term “supererogatory” raises a challenge to Kratzer’s classic ordering semantics of deontic modality, which treats deontic modals as quantifying over the set of the best worlds: It is puzzling why there could be a supererogatory world that is better than those best worlds. In this paper, I will provide two ways to accommodate supererogation in the ordering semantics, one is to treat supererogatory as a necessity modal, the other a possible modal. I argue that the possible modal view is more promising than the necessity modal view.

 

 

On A New Content Indeterminacy Problem in Neuroscience / Caitlin Mace

Whether neurons represent or play a mere causal role is a foundational issue in philosophy of neuroscience. Evidence that neurons perform a representational role is weakened by the possibility of explaining experimental results by appeal to brute causal processes alone. Despite this, neuroscientists ascribe representational content to patterns of neural activity to explain experimental results. An important problem with this practice is determining which content to ascribe to the neural activity, as content ascription will determine the function of the neural activity. One view is that researchers are only warranted in ascribing the content determined by particular experimental results (Cao 2022). An alternative view is that researchers are also warranted in appealing to the broader research domain to determine the content of a putative neural representation. In this paper, I argue for the latter option by appealing to optogenetics research on memory engrams as a case study. Whether a particular content ascription is justified depends on the broader research domain that is appealed to and how various animal models, probes, and experimental paradigms are generalized.


 

 

Form, Function, and Self-Identification in the Definition of the Family / Danielle Ravitzki

The nuclear family is a cardinal social group in our daily life, and has been a subject of interest for many philosophers. As scholars began challenging the notion that the family is solely dependent on blood lineage and biology, various theories arose describing how the family should be defined. Relying on the works of such social philosophers, I claim that the definition of the family should be based on the idea of consent and personal choice, and that such an open-ended definition would adequately capture and embrace the various familial arrangements that exist today.



 

 

No Epistemic Discounts

/ Richard Roth

This note explores the combination of epistemic decision theory, the claim that we must do what’s best in expectation given our knowledge, with optimistic theories of knowledge, according to which we can know all sorts of things that aren’t certain on our evidence. I argue that plausible optimistic theories of knowledge make knowledge defeasible and “know” heavily context-dependent in ways that cause problems for epistemic decision theory.


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